The Last Tudor

CHEQUERS, BUCKINGHAMSHIRE,

SUMMER 1566

Every day starts earlier and I watch the trees from my window show a haze of the lightest green that slowly grows to a vibrant spring bursting of leaves. When I walk in the garden, I wear a shawl around my shoulders instead of a heavy cape, and the birdsong is loud all around me. One morning I hear a cuckoo so loud and so distinctive that for a moment I am back at Bradgate and Katherine is pulling me by the hand and jumping over the furrows of a newly plowed field, saying, “Come! Come! Perhaps we will see him. A cuckoo is good luck.”

I have such a longing to be free in this season. I see the rabbits under the greening hedges and the hares loping through the mists of the bowling green in the early morning. I hear the foxes bark at night and the owls calling love songs from one high chimney pot to another. I am so conscious of my own youth and my own freshness in this young season of bursting life. I can’t sleep at night with desire for Thomas. We had so little time together, and yet my skin remembers every touch. I want to love my husband. I want to lie against his long bulk. I don’t care where we live, I don’t care if we are poor, I don’t care if we are disgraced. If I could be free with him, I would be happy.

And then I hear some good news, perhaps the start of joy for me, as slight and light as the greening trees which burst into leaf. Katherine’s jailer, Sir William Petre at Ingatestone, is too ill to keep her in his house any longer. Perhaps God has not forgotten us heirs. There is Ned without his jailer, and now Katherine, too. I really think it possible that my sister might come to me, or that we all might be released and kept under house arrest together. Surely, it would be cheaper and easier to hold us under house arrest in one house? I write to William Cecil saying that I should be so much happier if we might be imprisoned together. That, surely, it would be more convenient for Her Majesty if we were in one place, that my sister would need fewer attendants for I would care for her little boy, I would see that she ate, I would be company for her.

And more economical, I write winningly. For we could share our fires and our servants. I ask him if he will request it of Her Majesty, and also that Thomas Keyes might be released to live with his children in Kent. I will undertake to never see him, and he will promise never to see me. But it is worse than bearbaiting to keep a great man like Thomas in a cramped cell. It is not Christian charity. You would not keep a big ox in a small pen like this. He has done nothing but love me, and he would never have spoken if I had not encouraged him.

I receive one of Sir William Cecil’s rare replies. He writes that my sister Katherine is to go into the keeping of another loyal courtier dug up from obscurity, almost in the grave from old age: Sir John Wentworth who lives at Gosfield Hall. She will live in the west wing, she will be served by her ladies. Her son Thomas, who has never known life out of imprisonment, who has never seen an open sky in all his three years, will remain with her.

As for Mr. Keyes, he is to be allowed to walk in the yard and stretch out his long legs, William Cecil writes with a glimmer of his old humor. The queen is disposed to show him mercy, and there are many who urge forgiveness for you and Lady Katherine in these troubling times. I am foremost.

I am not quite sure what especially Cecil means by “troubling times,” since these are the only times we have known since his protégé came to the throne, but in June I hear that the worst thing for Elizabeth has finally happened: the Scots queen Mary has given birth. Even worse for Elizabeth, who urged Mary’s husband to fire a gun into her belly, the young woman has survived the birth. Worse still, it is a healthy baby. And worst of all for Elizabeth: it is a boy. The papist cousin, just like the Protestant cousin, has a healthy son and heir to the throne of England. Elizabeth, thirty-two years old, unmarried, unloved, now has two cousins with boys in the cradle. She cannot deny them all.

What she does, of course, is what she always does. She runs away and pretends that it is not happening. The Chequers cook is friends with a royal groom and we hear all about the fine celebrations at Kenilworth, when Robert Dudley throws his fortune at the feet of his queen and most elusive lover. Apparently, there is a whole new wing of rooms built just for her visit, and masques and hunts and a specially commissioned play and fireworks. After his disappointment of Candlemas he is throwing himself into another attempt at wooing. This year he has left court in a rage or in despair twice, and both times she has humbled herself to beg for his return. It is clear to everyone that she cannot live without him. He must be wondering if it is clear to her.

I sit in my tiny room and I think of Elizabeth my cousin watching fireworks reflected in the great lake at Kenilworth, and I try to damp down the bitterness of my rage. I am not a melancholy prisoner like my sister Katherine, I do not give myself up to grief. I cannot forgive Elizabeth for her insane treatment of us. I think of her as a malicious madwoman, and when I write one of my regular letters pleading for forgiveness, promising my undying loyalty, I am lying like all of her courtiers. She has made a court of liars, and I am the worst.